The Girl and the Spider [2021]

 Ramon Zürcher and Silvan Zürcher’s sophomore film The Girl and the Spider – and their first in 8 long years since their debut film The Strange Little Cat – was permeated with such a brooding and engulfing sense of melancholy, that one might almost ignore the sly, seductive and entrancing ambiguity, and delicate formal precision, with which it was so meticulously composed. It was an alternately haunting, droll and beguiling tale of longing, separation, lonely individuals, cryptic relationships, sexual gamesmanship, momentary reconciliations, and the various interlinkages between. The premise was simple – Lisa (Liliane Amuat) is moving out of her apartment in Berlin – which she shared with her roommate Mara (Henriette Confurius) – to another one in the city. This seemingly routine act of movement foregrounded a myriad emotions, and underlying intricate equations, that are laid nakedly threadbare over a couple of days. The strikingly beautiful, psychologically complex, impulsive, enigmatic, lonesome, deeply vulnerable and oftentimes unpredictable Mara formed the centre-point in the directors’ vivaciously crafted canvas where a host of people – family, friends, neighbours, workers and even strangers – move in and out of the frame like a meticulously orchestrated stage-play. We therefore see Lisa’s mother who strikes a bond with an ageing carpenter, a couple of girls who stay downstairs, a taciturn guy who pines for Mara, a shaggy bloke who cares for a neighbour’s dog, an old and intensely lonely lady, a former housemaid who’s left her piano behind, etc. Realism was often subverted with flights of imagination, fantasy and memories in this tight yet freewheeling work –photographed and scored with warmth, and with the mood switching between cold and tender – where catharsis loomed just round the corner like a missing cat.

Directors: Silver & Ramon Zucher

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Existential Drama

Language: German

Country: Switzerland

Sister [2012]

 The physical distance between the blue-collar apartment block at the mountain base and the blockbuster luxury skiing resort up above accessible only by cable cars – in Ursula Meier’s edgy, incisive Swiss drama Sister – may’ve been a few kilometers, but the real disparity was far more humongous. Meier admires the Dardennes, and hence if this tale of an alienated working-class orphan forced to hustle in order to fend for himself – and filled with grungy, muted realism stripped of sentimentality – evoked a number of the veteran Belgian duo’s works, one wouldn’t be too far off the mark; however, that an Alpine resort – with its fairy tale allure for tourists – formed the strikingly atypical backdrop, ensured that this was neither derivative nor unoriginal. 12-year old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), a wiry, inexpressive, jittery pint-sized dynamite, lives with his older sister Louise (Léa Seydoux) at the said apartment block which looks like a granite sphinx erected in the middle of nowhere. Louise is impetuous, reckless and self-destructive; she disappears for days with random guys, is lusted after by the neighbourhood kids, and earns peanuts as a part-time cleaning woman. As a result Simon must earn in order to purchase basic necessities for both – and, not to mention, also because he hankers for her love and attention, the reason for which came off like a stunner later in the narrative – which he does by stealing expensive skiing equipment from wealthy tourists, and selling them to those who can’t afford them otherwise. Klein was like a live wire on a lighted fuse, and hence in the rare moments when his vulnerability got exposed, delicately laced the film’s gritty exterior with both pain and empathy.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Ursula Meier

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama

Language: French

Country: Switzerland

The Image Book [2018]

 Avant garde, dizzyingly impressionistic, infinitely experimental, confounding, opaque, intellectually dense, eclectic, kaleidoscopic, discursive, freewheeling and infuriating too – Godard’s arresting audio-visual montage The Image Book is such a distinctive and defiantly unclassifiable work that the most pertinent epithet to summarize it is probably ‘Godardian’. The film played out along three different axes, viz. a barrage of socio-politically bristling ideas, a thrilling array of cinematic references, and – in defiance of the fact that he’s nearly a nonagenarian – unceasing formal playfulness. Its topicality is emphasized by some of the themes that are covered – wars, imperialism, colonial exploitation, horrors of the Holocaust, oppression of the Palestinian people, the complex role played by trains in both industrial progress and massacres, etc. – even if one can never be fully sure of everything or where he’s taking us to, in the way he even mixed real contexts with fictitious passages. The themes were juxtaposed and counterpointed with a hypnotic and beguiling collage of sequences from a string of works both renowned and obscure, including Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, Keaton’s The General, Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, etc., as well as few of his own too, like Le Petit Soldat. The above facets were stitched together through a myriad video and tonal manipulations with the medium – hyper-saturation of images, abrupt changes in aspect ratios, superimpositions, etc., and not to mention the recurring haunting score, and an idiosyncratic narration by Godard himself in a hoarse voice, large sections of which weren’t subtitled. The work, therefore, highlighted his continued love affair with digital filmmaking, while emphatically underscoring his non-puritanical iconoclasm and re-confirming the vitality of his caméra-stylo.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Genre: Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: French

Country: Switzerland

Alpine Fire (Höhenfeuer) [1985]

Alpine Fire was the first feature film by documentary filmmaker Fredi M. Murer, and my first tryst with Swiss cinema. The director deserves kudos for displaying considerable restraint and maturity in dealing with a challenging subject matter – that of a dangerously intimate relationship between two siblings against an ironically claustrophobic backdrop. The aforementioned family, comprising of a laconic father (Rolf Illig), his ailing wife (Dorothea Moritz), and their two children, viz. Belli (Johanna Lier) and her younger brother (Thomas Nock) referred simply as “the Boy”, live in a quaint and remote location in the Alps. The Boy, who has been deaf from his birth, spends his day silently involved in laborious tasks assisting his father. His inability to communicate, however, leads to sudden displays of agony and violence, and this becomes an especially stiff obstacle in his path when faced with his oncoming puberty which he finds increasingly difficult to deal with, and therein begins his growing emotional and physical closeness with his loving elder sister, whose naivety too is at odds with her precocious physicality on account of residing so far off from human civilization. The director employed an oft-used technique by juxtaposing the psychologically dense and disturbing content against breathtakingly beautiful surroundings, and though the dialogues were the weakest link in the film, he made deft usage of long moments of silence, along with leisurely pacing and gradual narrative buildup, to create a strongly palpable sense of mood and tension. Upon the inevitable discovery of the forbidden liaison, while the mother reacts with calmness the father does so with fury, thus leading this finely enacted film to a deeply elegiac climax, and the siblings to a sudden process of growing up.

Director: Fredi M. Murer

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Family Drama/Coming-of-Age

Language: Swiss German

Country: Switzerland